San Francisco is a mess. How bad is it? Homeless people in tents line major streets, the city stinks of urine and feces, trash is everywhere, and now drug addicts are shooting up in the city’s subways — right out in the open.
A frustrated resident, Shannon Gafford, took videos last week of the scene inside a San Francisco BART station, where the junkies were shooting drugs into their veins as commuters walked by. [Warning: Graphic video.]
How’d it all get so bad? In a word, the liberal policies of the liberal politicians who run the city — which includes Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who represents the 12th congressional district, made up entirely of San Francisco.
“The trash, our homeless, the needles, the drug abuse on our streets, I’ve seen it all in our city and it’s gotten to the point where we need to really change course,” Democratic Mayor Mike Farrell told the Daily Mail. “We’ve gone away from just being compassionate to enabling street behavior and that, in my opinion, is a shift that’s unacceptable.”
His plan: Spend $750,000 to hire city workers to pick up used needles. That’s right, his solution is to pick up the needles. Seriously. Farrell also wants to spend another $13 million for a two-year project to buy heavy duty steam cleaners and portable toilets. Yeah, that’ll solve the problem.
Homelessness has spread across San Francisco as real estate prices have gone through the roof. The drug problem has also exploded in the city, and officials there all pass the buck for who’s responsible for solving the crisis. BART officials say they can’t patrol the entire subway system, and city police say they don’t have jurisdiction there.
Meanwhile, residents are becoming increasingly frustrated by the disgusting state of the city. Several other cities are suffering the same fate, like Anaheim outside of Los Angeles where a huge homeless camp popped up earlier this year. “Trash trucks and contractors in hazmat gear have descended on the camp and so far removed 250 tons of trash, 1,100 pounds of human waste and 5,000 hypodermic needles,” Fox News reports.
The disgusting state of many California cities comes after three decades of Democratic policies, which include unchecked illegal immigration and the enabling of those who flout the law. San Francisco’s crime rate, like its real estate prices, is also sky high, and the solution offered by the ever-increasing “big government” has failed to produce results.
Rather than solving the problems, officials in the worst cities have been battling President Trump over sanctuary city status and his plan to build a wall along the southern border to keep out illegals.
Again, you ask, how bad is it? “San Francisco’s feces problem is so bad that a website now exists to warn residents of which streets to avoid,” Fox reports.
And more: “The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit surveyed 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco in search of trash, needles, and feces. The investigation revealed trash littered across every block. The survey also found 41 blocks dotted with needles and 96 blocks sullied with piles of feces,” NBC reports.
But not everyone plans to be a victim in the whole mess.
“That isn’t going to happen in our county. It’s not going to be our skid row,” said Todd Spitzer, a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, south of Los Angeles. “We need to be compassionate and empathetic. I’m writing checks all over the place. But I’m not going to intermingle this population with property owners, are you kidding?”
For her part, Pelosi appears to care not at all about the problem, which made headlines across the nation last week. Instead, she vows that Democrats will retake the House in the mid-term elections and she will try to become speaker again.
“We will win. I will run for speaker. I feel confident about it. And my members do, too,” Pelosi told The Boston Globe.
So to San Francisco residents, we say: Settle in, get used to the junkies in the subways. After all, it’s what you keep voting for, so now it’s time to own it.